Legally Kidnapped

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

The morning after 17-month-old Semaj Crosby was reported missing from her Joliet Township home, state Department of Children and Family Services investigators and supervisors went to a strip mall office three miles away and began filing reports.

A Rochester woman allegedly punched an officer in the face as the Division for Children, Youth and Families took her 3-year-old child as part of a court order.

An officer, along with a representative from DCYF, went to a home on 34 Cross Wind Lane on Tuesday around 4:30 p.m. after a court order gave DCYF temporary custody of Cassandra Morton's child. Officers and DCYF planned to let Morton's child stay at the Cross Wind Lane home with grandparents as long as Morton agreed to leave, Capt. Jason Thomas said.

An inquiry into the historical abuse of children by their carers will be hampered by the destruction of records that were held by many of the charities who ran residential homes, a lawyer representing victims has said.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of children in Minnesota's foster care system are at risk of violence and neglect because officials are failing to investigate reports of abuse and place the children in stable homes, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

If Justin Trudeau means what he says about building a new relationship with Indigenous peoples, he should start doing less to defend his government and more to defend the First Nations children it has for too long let down.

42-year-old foster mother, Michelle Lee Hayes, was arrested last week for injury to a child after she allegedly abused a toddler in her care, causing bruising, swelling and bleeding to the child's brain.

A 45-year-old woman was sentenced to six months’ jail on Tuesday (May 30) for holding a chopper to a social worker’s neck, after she cancelled a planned visit with the woman's newborn son who was in foster care.

Records released last week that indicate Kansas officials investigated claims of child abuse for several years before a 7-year-old boy was tortured, starved, killed and fed to pigs may be strengthening some lawmakers’ desire to increase oversight of the child welfare system.

A federal audit released Tuesday heaped more criticism onto Texas' troubled child welfare system and warned of foster kids potentially put in jeopardy over missed deadlines during abuse and neglect investigations.

Danielle and Brandon have been in a contentious custody battle over their now 10-year-old daughter since shortly after she was born. Danielle, who currently has only visitation, wants custody back because she claims her ex is abusive and has threatened to kill her twice. She also accuses Brandon of neglecting their daughter by not providing basic necessities – all accusations Brandon denies.

A state district court will conduct a scheduling session this week involving a woman who has filed suit against the Hunt County District Attorney’s Office and a former state investigator, alleging she was the victim of malicious prosecution.

Monday, May 29, 2017

There's a correlation between the number of times students are suspended or expelled and their likelihood of ending up in the corrections system, which is prompting educators and law enforcement to come together in an effort to dismantle a so-called "school-to-prison pipeline."

Newly released records from Kansas Department for Children and Families reveal police and medical professionals, as well as social workers, were aware or suspicious that Adrian Jones and his siblings were being abused. Jones’ remains were found in November 2015 on the family’s Kansas City, Kansas, rental property after officers responding to a report of domestic abuse learned the then-seven-year-old boy was missing. The boy’s father, Michael Jones, was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 25 years. An identical sentence was ordered for Heather Jones, the boy’s stepmother, in November.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

The head of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services on Saturday conceded major problems with the handling of the Semaj Crosby case, but said, based on what he saw and reviewed, neither Semaj nor her siblings should’ve been removed from the home.

The Impact Project, the private foster care agency that employed homicide suspect Sara Packer and provided her with foster children, has been given a clean bill of health by state human services investigators.

42-year-old foster mother, Michelle Lee Hayes, was arrested last week for injury to a child after she allegedly abused a toddler in her care, causing bruising, swelling and bleeding to the child's brain.

A teacher accused of inappropriately touching a student at Lincoln Memorial Middle School has been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing and returned to the classroom, according to an Office of Professional Standards report released by the School District of Manatee County.

President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget proposal includes a slate of deep cuts and eliminations of programs aimed at serving youth and families, but includes a hefty increase in the amount spent on an entitlement for foster care and adoption assistance.

The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) of Toronto has changed its procedure for picking up children from schools, appointments and caregivers’ homes after a driver pulled the wrong boy out of class last week.

Friday, May 26, 2017

Attorneys for a young abuse survivor say they’re grateful to the Governor and the Florida Legislature for agreeing to further compensate their client. And, the claims bill signed into law also includes money for two more abuse survivors.

Insufficient services, a complex funding system and deep state budget cuts have increasingly stranded developmentally disabled children in hospital emergency departments over the past year, often for weeks at a time, two state advocates told legislators Thursday.

The deputy administrator of Washington County Children and Youth Services resigned Thursday as allegations arose that she overlooked the sexual abuse of a child while she worked in Greene County five years ago.

Newly released records from Kansas Department for Children and Families reveal police and medical professionals, as well as social workers, were aware or suspicious that Adrian Jones and his siblings were being abused.

State leaders say that Louisiana's budget crisis could have a startling impact on some of the state's most vulnerable residents, as the state's social services have faced tightening budgets and shrinking staffs in recent years.

Ohio has seen a 19 percent increase in the number of kids removed from parental custody since 2010. California has half the number of foster families it had 10 years ago, even though it has more children who need them. The number of children in foster care in West Virginia went up 24 percent between 2012 and 2016. And experts say the crisis is quickly moving into the Northeast.

When the Bringing Them Home report was released on 26 May 1997 Florence Onus was too busy to read the news. While Australians attempted to reconcile the truth of the assimilationist policies that had sought to destroy Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture by forcibly removing generations of children from their parents, she was dealing with its direct effects.

A federal civil rights suit in Houston accuses Child Protective Services of discriminating against African-American children, saying they are likelier to be separated from their parents and extended families than white children.

Police said employees at a local school and the Greene County Children and Youth Services office knew about accusations of inappropriate behavior by a foster mom, but continued to place children in her care.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Putting a hopeful coda on a horrific story that ended in 2011 with the discovery of the decomposing body of a 10-year-old girl in a truck along I-95 near Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard, Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday signed a bill giving Victor Barahona and his adopted siblings $3.75 million to rebuild their lives.

Weekday mornings this school year, Bonnie Barnes often awoke before 7 a.m. in her single bed, showered, and ate breakfast on the small dining table under a print that read, “Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.”

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Striking a better balance between programs to prevent child maltreatment and services for those who have already suffered from abuse could improve long-term outcomes for children and reduce child welfare system costs in the United States by $12 billion, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

Monday, May 22, 2017

So it may be surprising for you to learn that Kagan believes the diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is an invention which mainly benefits the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatrists.

The Irrawaddy Division government is investigating alleged abuse of children at an orphanage run by Buddhist monks in the village of Apyin Yay Sine, Labutta Township, a regional minister told The Irrawaddy.

Fourteen-year-old Ahmed Mohamed brought a homemade clock to school to show his engineering teacher. However an alarm on the clock went off during English class, resulting in him being sent to the office and the clock confiscated as a possible bomb. His family filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Irving and Irving School District for discriminating against the boy, aka “Clock Boy, based on his religion.

Friday, May 19, 2017

While a trial date was set Wednesday for one former Child Protective Services worker involved in the 2012 Tiffany Klapheke child death case, new evidence has postponed the trial of former regional director Martha "Bit" Whitaker.

An Indigenous woman who grew up in foster care unaware of her rich cultural background is worried the same fate will befall her own three children, who have been in the care of the Windsor-Essex Children’s Aid Society since 2013.

An Arizona Supreme Court decision not to review a ruling upholding the firings of five social workers who said they were made scapegoats has put an end to a 2013 scandal that enveloped the state’s former Child Protective Services agency.

A review of the Union County Department of Social Services’ foster care program by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has found the agency failing to follow state policies and procedures in a majority of cases.

Twenty-six years after a landmark child-neglect lawsuit triggered federal oversight of the Department of Children and Families, the competing sides are squaring off with a ferocity not seen since the class-action case — Juan F. vs. O'Nell — was first filed.

A corrupt social worker from Weston betrayed the trust of an adopted child’s family by asking her birth mother for £2,000 in return for revealing the little girl’s new address – despite fears she would be abducted.

The House unanimously voted to send the Senate a bill Monday creating a task force to better protect children in Kansas’ privatized foster care system and intensify scrutiny of contractors hired by the administration of Gov. Sam Brownback to care for neglected kids in state custody.

These are the words I heard last week from two siblings on my foster care docket in Travis County court. The children did not specify what religion, race or sexual orientation their foster family must be; they simply wanted to sleep in a safe, caring home rather than a hotel, state office or cold, institutional setting.

Regrettably, the response by the Department of Family and Protective Services was that right now there is no foster family for them in the entire state of Texas — even after an exhaustive search by DFPS lasting nearly two months.

This Mother’s Day, Jaime Rea will work her usual 4:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. Sunday shift at the doughnut shop she manages and then come home and probably watch a Disney movie as she “snugglebugs” with her 11-year-old son, Brandon Slezak, in the bamboo chair in the kitchen — all ordinary things that would have been impossible not long ago.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Kelsey Peterson and her husband talked about fostering children even before they married in 2011. The young couple was finally licensed to foster in May 2015, allowed to take in two children between newborn and 3 years old.

George Sheldon, a well-known figure in Florida politics who took over Illinois’ troubled child welfare agency in 2015, is embroiled in ongoing state ethics probes and facing scrutiny over contracts given to past campaign donors and consultants.

Friday, May 12, 2017

A McLennan County grand jury this week indicted Heather Michelle Bond, 29, a former CPS investigator, on a charge of endangering a child. It also indicted her husband, Preston Lewis Bond, 43, on two counts of sexual assault of a child, three counts of indecency with a child by contact, and one count of indecency with a child by exposure.

Peter Henry, 19, was ordered to spend the next 60 years in jail for the 2014 murder of his then-foster father, longtime public radio host Marvell Johnson, according to the Anchorage District Attorney's Office.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

A 42-year-old foster mother, Michelle Lee Hayes, from Marshall Texas, was arrested last week for injury to a child after she allegedly abused a toddler in her care which caused bruising, swelling and bleeding to the child’s brain.

The Texas House tentatively passed a bill Wednesday that would address major problems in the state’s troubled child welfare system, including overburdened caseworkers and timely health screenings of foster children.

He's learned two key truths: Just about every kid loves pizza, and an alarming number of American youngsters still can't afford a $2.35 lunch, despite the dramatic expansion of free and reduced lunch programs.

A bill to eliminate child support obligations for Louisiana criminal defendants and convicted criminals while they are incarcerated cleared its first hurdle in the Legislature on Tuesday (May 9). The aim is encourage ex-inmates to find jobs upon release, although even the sponsor, Rep. Joe Marino III of Gretna, admitted: "It's not an easy bill" to support.

Wisconsin child welfare officials on Monday defended the handling of an incident involving a runaway Dane County foster child discovered in a high-crime area of Chicago last week, after Cook County Sheriff’s deputies could persuade no one, including the girl’s foster mother in Madison and two Dane County agencies, to come and take her home.

Monday, May 08, 2017

The plight of foster children forced to sleep on air mattresses in offices last summer led to outrage and the state ordering additional oversight of Eckerd Kids, the agency that runs child welfare in Hillsborough County.

Anthony Singleton lies awake most nights haunted by questions of what he could have done to prevent the death of his infant son and three-year-old step-daughter. He searches for signs he might have missed in the behavior of his wife, who is charged with killing them.

The Northern Territory system of child protection is fragmented and under-resourced, and left children in dangerous situations far beyond the point of early intervention, a judge and former chief magistrate has told the royal commission.

More than 500 school employees in Prince George’s County have been placed on administrative leave at some point during this school year in response to alleged child abuse or neglect — a sharp spike over previous years amid a push to report suspicious conduct.

Sunday, May 07, 2017

As Arkansas's foster care crisis continues, the state is working to address problems like a shortage of foster homes and overloaded caseworkers. But one issue is often overlooked -- the number of kids who "age out of the system" without family support, direction, or knowing how to survive.

A Scarborough mother says her family was put through a terrifying afternoon after her six-year-old son was mistakenly pulled out of school and taken by the Children’s Aid Society for almost three hours Tuesday.

Saturday, May 06, 2017

Prosecutors called for maximum and consecutive sentences for Torace Weaver, which they calculated at 18 years to life.

“The 20 separate blunt force injuries to Stanley’s head, face and neck, in conjunction with the disfiguring burns to his arm and buttock, and the fatal injury to the back of his skull represent a depraved disregard for the life of a child that needed the care, protection and support that this Defendant, as his foster father, was supposed to provide,” wrote assistant prosecutor Kelly Madzey. “Nothing less than a severe sentence is warranted in this case.”

A former foster father acquitted by a Riverhead jury earlier this week of charges he sexually abused six boys in his care wants to sell his story to earn money to support himself, according to his attorney.

After the United PR disaster in which footage of a doctor being forcefully removed from an overbooked plane went viral, you'd think airlines would realize that they're always being filmed. But now, footage from a Delta flight in which an employee tells a husband and wife that they'll be arrested and their infant son placed in foster care if they don't vacate their seats is hitting the internet.

Expressing continued frustration over the death of a 16-month-old Joliet Township girl, a Will County judge Wednesday said she wants all the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services cases in the county to be brought to her courtroom.

The private nonprofit agencies that manage Kansas’ foster care system do not have the capacity in many parts of the state to handle the volume of cases they deal with, and the Kansas Department for Children and Families often does not conduct adequate oversight of those contractors. Those are the findings of a Legislative Post Audit report on the foster care program that was delivered to lawmakers Friday. However, auditors also said there would be enormous costs for the state if it decided to take back control and operation of the program itself. The report was the third and final part of a comprehensive audit that lawmakers ordered following two deaths in 2014 of children who were in the foster care system. …

KV Health Systems, headquartered in the greater Kansas City area, is a private nonprofit that specializes in behavioral health care, child welfare, and community health and wellness. The Capital-Journal has learned as many on as six nights in the past month, a child waiting to be placed in foster care has slept overnight in a KVC Health System office.

A three-year-long legal argument about committing foster children to North Star Behavioral Health Hospital is one step closer to resolution. A judge ruled in late March that the Office of Children’s Services can legally commit foster kids to the psychiatric hospital without getting a judge’s approval.

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